On today’s episode, we are joined by Pavel Moravec, the co-founder and co-CEO of Braiins. Braiins is the company behind Slush Pool, the world’s first Bitcoin mining pool. They are currently working on the Braiins OS which is a fully open source operating system for cryptocurrency embedded devices. His team is additionally working on Stratum V2, which is a new redesigned mining protocol that is more flexible, secure and decentralized.
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1BRJjQpaRYvGw https://www.facebook.com/groups/crypto.mining.tools/permalink/504466230467350/ https://www.facebook.com/cryptominingtoolspodcast/videos/2653008674789779/ https://www.facebook.com/scott.offord.milwaukee.seo/videos/10162891377745024/
Transcription
Welcome to the broadcast, everybody, this is Scott Offord with the crypto mining tools podcast, your host. And we’ve got Ethan Zurka over here and Pavel down there. Hi. From Slush pool and Braiins. OS. yeah. So Pavel, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do there at your company?
Yeah, of course. The company is called Braiins. It’s a, it’s, it’s a typical thing with people not, don’t get precisely that the company is called drains the, the main product would be do his brain soy, its operating system for miners. And the biggest project we were working on the last seven years already as developing and operating Slush. Pool. And this is what takes all our time and this company and yeah, we are having nice riots because we lost the whole ecosystem and, and what would we do? And yeah, this is roughly w what we are up to. My background is computer science. I started as a programmer analyst, did some consultancy and this around. But after getting to Bitcoin, everything changed. And we do, what do we do from this point? And, and I personally don’t want to switch in any time
Now, Pavel, for our audience that are maybe new to cryptocurrency or you know, just the space in general, can you give some more in depth information about what brain’s OS is now? I mean, just isn’t simply a firmware. Does it work with every miner? Does it work with any kind of minor?
Tell us the detail. Yeah. if you have a mining machine, a sick like let’s talk about Bitcoin mining then the hardware needs to be controlled by some firmer. It’s typically a Linux-based operating system. And and the whole software stack is pretty, pretty high. And what brain’s OS is, is the operating system and all the software, which is on the hardware itself, it allows the machine to be connected to a mining pool or some proxy. It controls the hardware, eh, does all the stuff like tweaking speed of the fans booting the machine, connecting it somewhere. A lot of configuration stuff is happening and what makes brain so as a special or how it ended up being quite quite as spic us. It is open source. We, we provide everybody, the sources so you can take the, the codes and you can customize it, you can change it, you can flush it to your device and you can run your own version. And yeah, this is the key key feature. It allows miners to be sure what exactly is running on their machines because obviously my name is about Manet and it’s sometimes needs to work against bad people and bad actors. So being in control of what your what you’re running on the machine it’s obviously a plus. It can help it getting audits or for, I don’t know, financing field operation and stuff like that. But in general, we believe that open source is useful and a good thing.
Oh, absolutely. I’m a huge proponent of open source now other than just giving you into end control, does it have any other advantages? Like can, can you unlock features and functionalities in these miners that the manufacturer knows about and has access to, of course, preventing the users from, from accessing that. Tell us about that.
Yeah. The, the fact that you have the full source goat for operating the machine you can tweak anything. You can use any feature, what the hardware provides so nobody can prevent you to use some features of the chip. If you have the specifications or if you can figure out what Howard the Harbor actually operates, then you can tweak it and you can use it as you wish which allows you to build your solutions. For example, people are putting some management or monitoring staff director, the machines of various things. You probably thought about enabling AC boost features, but what was one of those biggest stories related to brain says before, when we allow it to people using a [inaudible] to run the chips and like fully spec using AC boost using all the harder features. And this is over basic boost, not covert overt AC boost.
Can you tell us, sorry, just tell us a little bit about, about that, that whole overt and covert async boost and what Bitmain was doing and, and why, why you guys decided to to come out with this.
Yeah. the, the whole AC goose story is quite long. People speculated long years about minors using AC boost, the [inaudible] technology for getting better efficiency from their minors. There were never proofs, if I’m not mistaken, that somebody used a covert version and a lot of people are suspicious about [inaudible] and direction that there should be full civil to run AC boost on this machines. But the, the stuck firmer did it allow it. And we did find some Tracy’s and the source code which pointed us to a conclusion that it should really be the death case. And my partner shoppach he, he spent some time on this and at the end we figured out that it could be actual Iran. And it was an obvious thing to open it and give it give it to minors because it was like how Familia and I didn’t know miners out there like the machines capable of running a substantially more efficient way and people kit could not use it. It was real outrageous. I cannot speculate about why Bitcoin why, why Bitmain this, these kinds of things. Why was not allowed for everybody to use it. It would be pure speculation. Obviously I have my, my internal opinions
Now, do you think bit main was actually running a boost for themselves and then not allowing, you know, everybody else you could detect it, you could see it in blog headers, the Swanson’s chart. Do you use this feature? You need to tweak literally visible fields, the first field in Bitcoin header which is and version to allow over a, over a SIG boost. It could be detected. So there are speculations if they could use the same harder for covert version of AC boost, which could be technically done. And again, no, like conclusive proof was farmed. It wouldn’t be smart. I mean, mining is about getting as much as as my, as many issues as possible by using as a slow and as energy as possible, so it could be useful and you want to have the advantage.
So, so did you feel that or did your company feel that there was an unfair advantage by one of the big players out there? And so did you kind of see it as a moral obligation to, to even the playing?
Yeah, I think it’s like buying a product and somebody preventing you to use the product that you paid for. It’s, yeah. I mean, buy a car and not, never shift more than a third gear. Yeah. Yeah. Big because somebody wants to run faster than you on a racetrack. So yeah, I think this is, this is another, right? Yeah. You just paid for the machine and it’s capable of doing what, what it’s capable and, and, yeah.
So a change of topic really quick here. We have a comment from somebody that is watching on YouTube right now live. And they say they want me to read this comment. They say I’m ranking by background.
Is number one, Scott, number two, Ethan, number three. Pavelle but ranking by coolness I think, you know, by the person is number one. Number two. Is it a tie between me and Ethan?
Well, I would like to know what the objective function would be. How to like handsomeness or smartness. You didn’t shave. Maybe it’s, yeah. Oh yeah, it’s gotta be the beard even. Great. So yeah. Anyway, let’s just segue. Ethan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about our podcast sponsor?
Yeah, I’d like to give a big shout out to our sponsor Novablock. They are new to the mining polo arena and in just the short time, I think now six months that they’ve been in North America, they’re now the fifth largest mining pool in the world, which is amazing. And the way they got there is they believe that as hash rate shifts from China into North America, they want to, you know, onboard customers with giving them transparency and educating them as to, you know, what pool is the right fit for them. Scott’s gonna follow up here up with, with how to get a deal from them. Yeah, they’re great.
So on the top right hand side, if you just click the signup button enter your information and then there’s an invite code. If you put in offered 18OFFORD, you’ll actually get a permanent reduction in your pool fees down to 1.8%. So yeah, give that a shot and try out Novablock. Otherwise, yeah. Let’s get back to the conversation at hand with Pawel from his wonderful company,
No, not Pablo. I could imagine people to cast. I am aware that you also are part of a new stratum protocol. So can you explain to us like, you know, the current strata protocol and what you are doing, your innovation with the new stratum protocol? Like, how, how does it work? How does it benefit? Yeah. of course all basically mining currently runs on protocol. It is chasten based take thanks to base protocol basically, which just really old and it is super useful and it does work somewhat properly and it was well, but it is all old and current player. The whole industry is much more a matrix. There is, there are different needs for communication protocol for, for mining. And what do we need a struggle? Just to be clear, the, the stratum is actually the connection between the minor and it tried to rip the block. Yeah, you can, you can imagine it is as a communication language between a pool server and we discussed before they need to communicate somehow they send messages one way and another.
So just like your browser uses hypertext, transport language, HTML and HTTP, it is HTTP on. Okay. Or TCP of blossom. HTTP is a better thing because a stretch on the rounds on TCP as well. So the, as the same way as HTTP is text-based the original origin will start to be one with stick space. Okay. Obviously there are efficiency enhancements in HDDP as well, so it’s run, it’s running in a binary mode mostly nowadays as well. And one of the things we changed for what we to is like working on efficiency, but there is a lot of, lot of enhancement we could imagine while implementing and running and operating the slush pool for so many years. And from the other perspective, once we got our hands dirty, davit writing from Murphy saw some inefficiencies and, and Vara SCWorks on the F on the critical from February perspective as well.
So we thought we have a great opportunity by like touching both ends to replace the original protocol and bring something what would solve all our problems either on a firmer side or our service side and bring new features to the vertical, which would allow a new use cases, our support, current use cases better. There various aspects of the new protocol. One is like bringing much better efficiency on several levels. There’s a lot of small improvements we could make cause version it’s just a random four messages and it somewhat works, but it can be done more in, in more clever way. And once we started to think about what we can drink into the forbid co we ended up finding a better hash specification which was a great inspiration for working on a critical feature of we two, which is work selection by minors. So this is one of the core features now in we, and there is a lot of various aspects of this we could discuss, but I’m not sure if this is the correct audience to discuss technical details. Oh yeah, we’d love it. Yeah. Yup.
Yeah. So we’re watching our, our minors either hobbyist or, or professional. So we can, we target the industrial mining industry.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. So for like the core feature of, let’s start with the block selection thing or chip selection thing. You as a minor, a needs to work on a block block template which is sent by a pool which creates this assymetry who decides what to mine on. You as a minor owns your machines. So technically you should be the one cable should be able to pay side what blocks your machine this or that it, it was meant this way. But the concept of a pool mining as is implemented right now gives pools more, more power because they get, choose the template and you just, you as a miner just and do the work. Do the hashing.
We’ve also been told that they can also choose not only you know, which blocks to mind, but they can actually choose which currency to mind. Like, you know, moment to moment they can switch from Bitcoin to, you know, another SHA256 and they can manage hash rate and manipulate profitability that
It can be seen as floss or a minus. It depends the fact that you can mind different currencies and do a coin switching as a sculpt. It can be a good thing if it’s done in a way that agreed this is happening, then it’s fine. We found some occasions that it was not agreed. Sure. And it is a different story. Yeah, but you as a, as a pool pro provider, you have the power to choose blocks, which mean you, you choose transections and you can prevent somebody or try to prevent that. Some transactions are mined into blocks. And what we can see the BCH lately is dairy simple similarity for minors to like the pools to make an agreement and choose there and sell, sell hash power to them. Yeah. Yeah.
So the concept of work selection, dung by the miners, some somewhat solve this problem. Not completely. It would be dishonest to say that it completely eliminates this assymetry. But it goes pretty far towards you could, you could run a full node, you could choose your own transections, you can prioritize them as you wish. You would probably prioritize the highest feed as expected. But it’s, it cannot be or it can be a different case for you because it’s your machines so you can do whatever you want. And if he around a full nodes or has a, has access to a full node, then the strutting V2 Loz to negotiate with the pool that I want to mine on this particular version of of a block. And it can be done without losing efficiency. The, the, the most difficult things related to block selection or work selection was to find an algorithm or protocol how to allow minors to do this and not cause a major problem like resource issues on the service side.
If, if every minor is now starting to send block templates to a pool, you cannot validate it. It’s just so, so, too much, too much data. Yeah. So there are some clever tricks. How would this can be done in an efficient way so that miner can choose a blog themselves and obviously they can port cast the block if they find find block without even when I would even communicate. I think with the pool for example, if a pool is not cooperating on on, on the block for some, some reasons, there is still some vector at tech from poolside or how to call it full can with like can hold your coins, what you, what you should be paid for your work. But the pool cannot prevent you to broadcast the block if you find it. And typically what you can see is bigger farms, speaker miners tend to be paid very frequently.
So there is only a limited amount of money. What you’re getting risk by a pool, not not doing its job. And it’s not a big risk because no pool would like to be in a triple Twitter not paying the controversy, but still the, you know, the theory needs, needs to cover even these, these possibilities. But the nice thing is they cannot prevent you to actually mine a block with certain properties you, you choose. And if there is enough minors like this then the chance of being censored out as for example, someone who wants to pay, make a transaction. And, and what predators would like to prevent this if there is enough minors doing this kind of job selection, it’s basically ample civil to prevent the transaction of being mined in. So, so kind of to wrap it up in a nutshell, what it does is it streamlines the efficiency of communication all at the same time empowering the miner to select what work it does.
Yeah. This is one of the key new features to be completely open. There needs to be a lot of work done on other parts of the protocol so that you can start to implement this feature. The best thing the worst thing about certainly two is it is more complicated to be more efficient. It is slightly more complicated on like the message level. There is more different messages. What and more complex interactions but then it can give you some, some efficiency gains. And this crown feature off of job selection is built on all the foundational stuff which you have to implement first. So we, we are going to give people full implementation of the, of the standard protocol open sourced as it should be to help adoption of course. And after that we would start to build a job selection thing because yeah, it’s gonna take some time, but I think it, it can take some time.
The good thing is we have the route lines. We know that the current protocol has, we would start to build, build it, can support this feature, and it’s just a matter of engineering effort to get there. But the infrastructure would be already already present. So yeah, it’s going to take some time, but that’s awesome. That’s fascinating. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Scott, can you read the question? We, we’ve got a question from our audience here. Yeah. So somebody on YouTube let crypto says Pavelle what, what is the craziest conspiracy theory that you believe that is related to the Bitcoin mining industry? Oh, interesting. I tend to folder out everything what at least somewhat smells like conspiracy theory cause it just eats your brain. And we all have better things to do than thinking about stuff like this.
So I don’t know, I probably don’t have any really spices story. Well, I mean you were mentioning before previously how a major manufacturer of minors was, you know, showing up on the blockchain doing something that they weren’t enabling their customers to do. Yeah. The whole AC goose thing is a bake a contender for but it’s not conspiracy theory, you know. Okay. Have you ever seen anything else even more extreme than that on the bleeds? I think it was cold. Yeah. I can’t believe the thing with calling home think it was funny because we analyze the cold when the unclean for out and we, we were asked to double check that the code actually does what the people thought it does. We had a funny dinner and that time was funny because a lot of guys very around a computer tried to get what they could, could, could do instead of eating burgers. Which somewhat explains, but it guys tend to laugh to do. This was quite nice and I’m not sure if it was really it is necessary more than effect. I can imagine it was a mistake. But it was draped in a way that it showed how important is to look at the source. Yeah. It’s technically possible to be hijacked like that easy. Right. Because the cold would work. The fact that it didn’t happen. Large scale, like shutting, shutting off other farms, we were just lucky. Yeah. Just great finger.
So I, I have a question coming up here. But first, Ethan, why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about what’s coming up in Miami.
Oh my gosh, guys. Like I cannot wait to go to the Mining disrupt conference and I know, I know my face lights up every time I talk about this. But you guys just, you don’t even understand like this is kind of the end all be all this is, this is what I live for, this is where everybody in our respective industries gets together. And we can all just, you know, friends, foes, competitors, you know, partners. We’re all the same at this event. We all, you know, can talk and we can understand what’s new, what’s on the horizon, what’s cutting edge. And I’m just so excited to get there and be a part of it.
Yeah. So July this year it’s happening in Miami and if you are looking for tickets, you can go to our special URL here to.tools/mining-disrupt. So that’s to.tools/mining-disrupt. And you can get 10% OFF of your ticket price. So you’ll see, you’ll know that you have a discount if it says Offord Scott up in the corner and it says 10% discount available. So if you’re looking for that link, let us know. Otherwise, just go to to.tools/mining-disrupt and you could save on your ticket price.
We’re going to be there. We’re going to save it and buy more miners from me. And Scott you said percent buy more minus for me and Scott, you know, and we will see you at mining disrupt. It seems like it was going to be even bigger than the last year. Absolutely. Yeah. There’s going to be way more exhibitors, a lot more attendees. There’s going to be a lot of space there. Are you guys going to be there? Yeah, sure. We were there the last year as well, but you didn’t know what to expect to be honest. So we didn’t bring a lot of people who are like three people there. Booth. it was a mistake. We should have better presence there and I, I we can help you with that hug. Call me then I will call you. We’ll definitely be there. Nice. Evans. Awesome.
So one question I had for you specifically, because you do work for a pool, you are cofounder of a pool. What do you think of BCH and that proposed tax or, or I guess I don’t know what they call it, a tax to build up the developer fund that, what do you think of that proposal?
I think it’s unfortunate. It’s that I don’t care about it too much, but I, the precedence is feeling unhealthy. And what it shows is there can be few guys can make an agreement, basically take everybody else. I’ll stitch. Yeah, I would list, this is centralization. We want decentralization. We wanted to get away from this. The worst thing about this is I don’t want these, see anything similar in a Bitcoin space, it would harm everybody. I mean, let’s, let’s look at the mining as a part of the larger bits going ecosystem. And we can, as a minor as you can harm ourselves by like sending bad signals to words, the whole, the whole industry or even to public. And just imagine people doing officially 51% attack in Bitcoin. What, what, what sign? It is I think it’s not so easy in Bitcoin, but the fact that it happened in BCH, it’s unfortunate from my perspective, so know about the money itself. I can imagine that the intentions could be good difficult to say what other people have in their minds. Yeah, I would, I would, I would not be part of it.
So yeah, thanks for that answer. How do you feel about the way it was proposed or, or presented? It seemed like at first they were you know, suggesting that Hey, this, this could be a great thing for the community and for Bitcoin cash development. But, but then, you know, as far as that presentation, did they do it in a, in the right way?
I’m not sure if I saw the origin presentation. So it’s difficult to comment on that. The principle is wrong. I mean, if there is no
Le, let’s look at what developers tend to do. So, okay, hold on. If they were just starting out and they had a brand new coin and they said right off the very beginning from the very offset, there’s going to be a percentage of tax, you know, that the developers get,
There are coins that do something similar. They’re not charging the users per se, but they’re setting a certain amount of side of the coin to, you know, reinvest into development. I think that’s the proper way to do it. I don’t think putting this burden, you know, what facing, if you fuzzy cash, it was it was clear from the beginning. You can like it, you, you, you kept thinking whatever you want about it, let it go. At least it was clear from the beginning, which is not this case. Yeah. Making it up as you go along. I don’t like that from the pool side, not from the coin developers side, right. Or, yeah. But it’s still a change. These features of the coin and, and it’s somewhat like one sided decision and people laugh. Coding. P people love to do some interesting stuff with their brains and computers. A world is full of very clever people writing software. And I don’t think this is a proper way how to attract people to build some applications.
You know, it cannot work. It’s, it’s going to attract greed and it’s not gonna attract innovation. There’s so many clever people working on projects and they laugh and they feel that they can bring some value by contributing their efforts and therefore their their money for working on some interesting project. And this is not the case. So even the intentions could be good. I don’t think it’s it’s right way how to, how to approach it. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, yeah, that’s a great, great explanation. But I didn’t, I didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing what, what actually was the communication and stuff like that. So if I miss some critical sorry, but I think this is roughly,
Yeah. We have a, another question here for you and, and we’ll make this our last question cause I think we’re running out of time. The minor Bay says, what does the future of the industry look like? And what do you imagine you’ll be doing three years from now? How much will your services have improved in that time period? I mean, I’ll be already quite capable of driving my lumbo. No, I don’t like the cars, but we are, I think we feel, everybody feels that you’re moving towards more and more professionalized industry. More and more companies are doing super clever things to be efficient on every single level. You can imagine this will continue because it’s mining. It’s about efficient and, and I can’t imagine a more public money will come to the space.
You started to Scott, sorry, I just had to move into my garage for the end of this. Yeah. So what we’re talking about, how do you envision the future? What do you think is going to look like? W w what about you? Pavelle personally or professionally
To do what I’m doing. Maybe less hours a week. But I liked the industry and I the space. And, and that, the vibe of people doing something, what they value, it’s really nice. It’s tough industry. I mean, everybody who minds for like for profit or for, for living knows that it is a tough industry is going to be tougher and tougher, but we just need to accept these basic principles, how, how this industry boards, but I would like to be in the space still
Yeah. I don’t know what’s, what’s going to happen. More public money I would say. And it would, it would be mostly driven or partly by broader adoption. And if more and more adoption comes into the space and validation by larger companies or potentially even someone government bodies, let’s say then more public companies with a lot of money would join in and we can see already is happening a bit. And people who would have to expertise build for the years and years. It’s something, what do you, you can get to overnight? A lot of people from industry would have a lot of work to help allocate this kind of money. Especially if if the price is going up, then we would see proportionally a lot of, a lot of money flowing into the Bitcoin interest infrastructure as well. It goes Hanson now
Without imposing attacks. Yeah. Hey, so before we leave we want to ask you how people can find you online. But before that, I just want to share with you Pavelle about a new firmware or the ant miner. S 17 plus. Have you heard about this and make the S 17 plus hash up to a hundred terahash per sec. Terahash per second at 40,000 Watts per terahash.
I have read an article in Boulder running some Intel CPU on almost seven gigahertz for a second with some nice Virginia liquid cooling. Yeah. Crazy stuff can be done. I would like to get my hands on the machine and firmer and actually see it, but yeah, I can imagine it’s, it’s possible. So let me, let me ask you this, Pablo, if, if we could provide that to you and you verified it, would you be willing to go public and say, you know, Hey, I’m one of the, the fundamental creators of brains, O S I’ve checked this out. It is stable. It works. It’s real. Yeah. If it’s true, I would, I would be capable of saying that. Yeah. Well, excellent. My notes, we’ll have to talk soon then. Yeah, we’ll have to talk, definitely. Okay. All right. So why don’t you tell us the machine then and use it for heating my flood absolutely. Or your pool or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So why don’t you tell people our audience, how they can find you on social media or, or around the web?
Use my name type. It’s through Twitter and, okay. I wish you good luck. Item. I know my handle Twitter handle. Okay. That’s cool. Let me find it. All right. Thanks for helping me with this. Yeah, but it’ll basically, and of course, you’re, you’re on telegram, right? Pablo, your algorithm? I like driving handbook. Okay. Underscore some of their, I guess. Right. Can you, can you put it up on the screen so people can see Scott? Yup. One second here. Okay. So awesome on Twitter. Here we go. Twitter posted there. Actually working harder in my social media presence. There you go. Hopefully we’re going to get you a bunch of new followers, right? Yeah. Thanks. All right, well above all, thank you for joining us today and we look forward to maybe having you on again in the future. Thanks for your time. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. Yeah, great. Okay. Take care.